The overall objective of the External Innovative Network Core is to promote international research collaboration in the area of health and economic status in older populations because of the potential for substantial scientific advances from such collaboration.. We will strengthen collaboration with other U.S. scholars and institutions, and we will place particular emphasis on international collaboration. We will establish collaborative research with international scholars and facilitate exchanges between other U.S. scholars and international researchers. As we have already established good working relationships with Asian scholars (which we will extend), our international focus will be to build relationships with European nations and possibly with others like Japan and Korea whose demographics of aging are similar in some ways to those in the United States. There is much to be gained from such collaboration. Research elsewhere has addressed topics not yet covered in U.S. research and would permit comparisons of the effects of differently policy levers, e.g., different social welfare structures. The potential for collaboration is enhanced by the availability of datasets in both the United States and Europe that parallel each other in many respects. This core will develop an international network of researchers and establish a research agenda on health and economic status in older populations. There is already an infrastructure of Europe in the form of the Training and Mobility Network, a university consortium training doctoral students in the economics of aging. We have obtained statements of willingness to collaborative from several scholars associated with that network. The core will develop research projects with these and other international collaborators that will make international comparisons and provide limited research support to these collaborators. It will also assist in the development of new international data gathering efforts. The core will organized conferences and workshops that will facilitated international comparative research by brining together international scholars from RAND and from other U.S. institutions It will establish a visiting scholars program and sponsor the attendance of international scholars at ongoing RAND institutes and workshops, including the RAND Summer Institute on the Demography, Economics, and Epidemiology of Aging (funded by NIA through a P01 grant. Finally, the core will support short research stays by RAND scholars at foreign institutions.